He wanted a vacation that required using our passports. I wanted a trip that wouldn’t beggar our family.
We compromised after I found World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), an international program that offers volunteers free or inexpensive room and board in exchange for a few hours of work.
Free or cheap food and lodging, almost anywhere in the world? Sounded good to us, and to our adolescent daughters, who are used to the Lonely Planet/Rough Guide approach to traveling.
After paying an annual fee ($10 to $60, depending on the country) that buys access to that country’s listings of WWOOF member farms and ranches, we looked at WWOOF-affiliated farms in France, Canada and Costa Rica. We eliminated farms that couldn’t take a family of four, or whose New Age-y, militantly vegan websites seemed a bit over the top.
Finally we settled on Cabañas Siempre Verde, a farm in the western mountains of Costa Rica. We e-mailed back and forth with WWOOF farmer Marcos Garcia Guzman, and the deal was done.
It was somewhat troubling that Mastatal, the village closest to his farm, was not listed on my map of Costa Rica or in any guidebooks I investigated. Puriscal, the more substantial town where we were to catch the bus to Mastatal, wasn’t mentioned, either. My husband, a seasoned and fearless traveler, told me not to worry.
So I didn’t, really — this place had a website! How remote could it be? — until a few weeks later, when we were on a bus bouncing down the unpaved road toward Mastatal. Outside, fierce rain slammed into the red clay. Uneasily, I peered out the foggy window, watching where mudslides chewed away at the road.
It was dark, and still raining, when we finally arrived. Guzman, a sinewy Tico (native) in his 20s, was waiting for us. By flashlight, he escorted us on a tour of what would be our home for the next few weeks.
We stashed our clothing and gear in a small ranch house that featured electricity and plumbing (but not hot water) and followed him down the road and up a hill to another house where we would eat our meals.
Going to our sleeping quarters involved another trek, bringing flashlights, rubber boots and toothbrushes to an elevated platform with mosquito netting on the foam-pad beds, candles for light and a compost toilet about 100 yards away.
I thought of my sister, a Peace Corps volunteer, for the first, but certainly not the last, time on our trip.
The next day, after a 6:30 a.m. breakfast (exquisite Costa Rican coffee, plus rice, beans, freshly made corn tortillas and the best mangoes I’ve ever tasted), we put on our boots and work gloves. Then we began digging and planting on a steep red clay hill where Guzman and previous volunteers had hacked terraced garden beds for corn, mustard greens, radishes, beans, tomatoes and cassava.
Our primary tools were shovels, machetes and a heavy metal pole with a quadangle blade that bit into the dense, stubborn earth. In less than an hour, our clothes were so saturated with sweat that we looked like we’d just climbed out of a pool.
Stabbing into the unforgiving clay, I thought of all the rototillers sitting idle back in el norte. I wished that all the undocumented Central and South American workers back in Colorado could watch a podcast of us toiling. Crazy gringos!
Work . . . and a workout On the plus side, two weeks of this — along with some construction work — made us look like we’d spent meaningful time with a personal trainer. Mostly, it was all the walking we did. Our sleeping quarters were a good 15-minute hike from the main road, and from the volunteer house, which served as our closet, to the house where we took meals, it was another 20-minute hike.
And that doesn’t count the hiking up and down the terraced fields, carrying lumpy sacks of topsoil, cassava, banana or pineapple plants. Even eating three substantial meals a day, I lost weight, and my arms looked almost as good as Michelle Obama’s.
On the downside, when we knocked off at noon, all we wanted to do was shower, eat, nap, maybe swim in the river (if we were up for the walk there and back), and hope that the frequently spotty Internet service was working at the little room housing Mastatal’s five computers.
We completely abandoned our original plan for our weekend downtime: taking the bus to the Pacific coast. None of us wanted an elective bone-jarring, snail’s-pace trip over those mudslide-prone roads.
Instead, we signed up with Marcos Guzman’s father, a cattle rancher and able horseman, for a horseback trip to a spectacular waterfall one Saturday. Another weekend day, we walked to nearby La Cangreja, Costa Rica’s newest national park, where the hiking trails intersect clear, rushing streams.
We could have opted for a rafting trip, or Spanish lessons at an open-air classroom. Sometimes, we moseyed up the road to visit Iguana Chocolate, a chocolate plantation that was also a WWOOF site.
The WWOOFers at Iguana Chocolate seemed to lead lives considerably lower maintenance than ours at Cabañas Siempre Verde. They apparently spent spend most of their time helping process, bag and sell ground cocoa.
On the other hand, we know how to plant bananas and cassava, how to craft a sunscreen from branches and palm leaves, and how to make tortillas from ground maize and water. We know how to bend wire and rebar into supports for concrete foundations, and how to use a machete to scrape a teak log down to the clean wood beneath the bark.
We also know, theoretically, how to kill a fer-de-lance, the deadliest and most aggressive snake in Costa Rica.
On our second night there, as Guzman led us by flashlight to our sleeping platform, a snake that looked a little over 3 feet long slipped just ahead of us across the path. Then it curled up and watched us.
“Don’t move,” Guzman said, and ran back uphill.
He came back with a long branch thicker than his arm. Keeping well away from the snake, he slammed it twice with the branch, breaking its spine, and then crushing its head.
The venom of a fer-de-lance causes massive internal bleeding and tissue destruction, and death if intervention isn’t swift. Had it struck one of us, the nearest hospital was easily 90 minutes away, and that’s only if we could get into a car immediately.
It was a sobering reminder of how close to the bone most of the world lives.
At home in Colorado, we don’t think twice about turning on a faucet to get hot, clean water. Once in Costa Rica, some new volunteers broke into a cache of chicken eggs and cooked them all. In the United States, it would be easy and cheap to buy more eggs. There, it threw a wrench into Guzman’s exactingly planned meals. Here, if we need wire, we go to a building supplies store. There, we scavenged old barbed wire to repurpose.
“You called that a vacation?” people say incredulously when they hear about our trip.
Well, yeah. And we’d do it again, even with the dicey transportation and the possibility of encountering another fer-de- lance. Our time in Costa Rica changed one farm, and each of us, a little for the better.
And believe me, when we came home from this trip, settling back into our modest home was like moving into a five-star hotel.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
